This Could be the Start of Something Big

The bells are ringing...

The first-ever known fatality on a space mission was Vladimir Komarov, a Soviet cosmonaut who died when Soyuz 1 crashed into Russian soil on April 24,1967. A lot of people had thought his spacecraft wasn’t quite ready yet, and he reportedly cursed Soviet engineers as he hurtled to Earth at roughly a trillion miles an hour with a parachute that wouldn’t open.

It wasn’t exactly a lingering death.

I studied journalism in college. “Studied” is a bit of an exaggeration. My college offered just one journalism course and I took it, so it wasn’t like it was my major or anything. I changed my major every couple of semesters, anyway, which had more to do with avoiding the Vietnam War than pursuing a life-long passion.

My interest in journalism was based on having worked on my high school paper, where I was the advertising manager. I wasn’t allowed to actually write stories, because the teacher in charge told me I was a smartass and that I would probably try to sneak smartass stuff into my writing.

She wasn’t wrong.

It appeared to me that my colleagues on the school paper who were writers, and were not smartasses, seemed to love what they did and had a really good time every day, which was what I was looking for in a career.

It also must be said that I had a paper trail of comments from English teachers praising my writing, and I had no such glowing support from any other discipline.

“Bob really knows his way around the Periodic Table, and he has a very promising future in chemistry,” said no teacher of mine, ever.

My school paper was “The Riparian,” which means “situated on the banks of a river,” because you could see White River from our windows. I figured the person who named it was looking out the window at the time.

My lone college journalism course met once a week, in a drafty downtown building that has long since been demolished. On one particular evening I really did not feel like going, but I had no good reason to skip it, so I climbed into my mother’s Pontiac and drove the six miles to class.

Our professor began with an announcement. The one remaining evening paper in town, “The Indianapolis News,” was looking to hire someone for a job called “copy cutter” and had asked him to recommend a good candidate.

The professor asked if anyone would be interested in the job. There were 15 of us in the class, and 15 hands shot up. He winced. He looked back down at his notes, and said oh yes, the work schedule was Monday through Friday, and the copy cutter had to begin work promptly at 5:30 a.m. every day.

The extremely early start was necessary because he or she needed to go through hundreds of stories that had moved during the night and take the best ones to the wire editor, who also started at 5:30 a.m. and thus would know if the copy cutter was even one minute late for work.

When the professor dropped this early bird bombshell on us, the 14 other hands instantly dropped. He gave me the number to call, and I got the job.

In those days, as now, newspapers got much of their news from wire services, such as the Associated Press and United Press International. The news spewed into the newsroom from clickety-clackety teletype machines at around 100 words a minute, which was so slow you could actually read it a line at a time as it was being printed out.

The News had six such machines, three for each wire service, but the most important two were for the “A-Wires,” where the really big news was going to pop up. Each of these machines was equipped with bells, to get the attention of everyone when a big story was breaking. The bigger the story, the more dinging there was.

The copy cutter had to be alert enough to listen for bells, recognize a big story, rip it off the machine when it was done printing and run it over to the wire editor. That’s about it. But with the machines grinding out endless stories, there was some responsibility involved.

On my first day, I set my big wind-up alarm clock for 4:30 a.m. and put it all the way across the room from my bed. There were no snooze alarms back then, so this was my only shot at getting it right.

I was happy to be able to wear a jacket and tie to work, for the first time ever. I had my own little table, my own metal ruler for cutting the stories apart and my own paste pot for pasting them back together again.

Also, I didn’t have to drive a forklift or work in a factory thick with airborne asbestos fibers, like in my previous jobs. They were paying me $84 a week, and I wouldn’t even have to get dirty unless you counted some ink stains from reading newspapers hot off the presses.

On that first morning, I cut copy like a wild man, taking promising stories up to the wire editor as I found them. He seemed pleased with my selections. Beginning at 6:30 a.m. the reporters and copy editors started drifting in, and I just kept cutting, my head cocked for the sound of bells.

At 10 a.m., the whole atmosphere changed. The deadline for the first edition had just passed, so at least people could stop typing and catch a breath. The wire editor, a clean-cut, short-haired gentleman named Russ, explained to me about wire services, also known as news agencies, which was good because I didn’t have a clue.

Basically, news agencies are like Marxism in its purest form. Newspapers contribute their locally gathered news to the wires to be used elsewhere, and in return they get to take what news they want that is provided by other far-flung newspapers. Everybody wins.

Russ said almost every country had at least one news agency. The French one was Agence France-Presse, the British one was Reuters, and so on. That was the first time I ever heard the name Reuters, an agency where I would later work for more than three decades.

Then, Russ squired me around the newsroom and introduced me to the actual reporters and columnists whose work I had been reading my whole life.

Some of these guys – and they were mostly guys – were legends of local journalism. All of them were very nice and not at all snobby, especially when I could tell each of them some specific story of theirs I had really enjoyed. If you can recognize a byline, you will make a reporter’s day. If you can quote from one of his stories, he will kiss you on the mouth.

I was having the time of my life, drinking coffee from genuine Styrofoam cups and talking with genuine writers. I would soon switch from coffee to tea because one day I saw a copy boy filling the percolator with water from a toilet in the men’s room, “because it’s faster.”

(My first newsroom, wire machines lining the wall. Photo by John M. Flora)

At some point early in the afternoon of that first day I was exchanging views with an editor on the copy desk when I heard dings. Lots of them, from both the AP and UPI A-Wire machines. I loped over to the bank of teletypes with the speed of a cheetah, and saw the one-line bulletin saying Vladimir Komarov had crashed upon re-entry.

I took the flimsy strip to the wire editor, who shouted to the editor and sent me back to fetch updates as they arrived. It was too late to make our first edition, but the news could still make the later editions, such as the one we sold in newspaper boxes for people to buy as they headed home from work.

I had never seen anything like it. Nobody shouted, “Stop the presses!” because they only do that in bad movies, but everybody worked together to see that in just a few minutes the public would learn about Vladimir Komarov from us.

It was like watching synchronized swimming, and I savored every minute of it. With my shift over, I thanked Russ and headed upstairs to Human Resources to fill out personnel forms.

Then, I walked onto the street, glanced at a newspaper box and saw the looming black banner headline: Soviet Cosmonaut Is Killed As Ship Crashes In Landing Attempt.

I shivered when I read it, and not because it was cold. At 5:30 that morning, working for a newspaper had seemed like a neat job. Now, only nine hours later, it seemed like a life’s work.